A breath of fresh air

Diane Symes, Chair of the AHDB Education Group, shares her passion for teaching children about food, farming and health eating.

It’s my passion - making sure children understand the facts about farming and food production, as well as the benefits of eating a healthy balanced diet. It’s a serious challenge and one that myself and colleagues, from AHDB and the industry, are keen to meet head on. It’s also a key reason why AHDB launched its Education Strategy, last year.

So how can all of us help to address this challenge? Personally, I’m very much influenced by those wise words of Mahatma Gandhi: “The future depends on what we do in the present.” As an organisation, AHDB is built on robust research. We regularly take time to question and understand both current practising teachers and younger audiences to learn how our industry can engage them. Sometimes, what we discover can be disappointing, though perhaps not surprising.

We know, for example, that children are not familiar with the degree of technology used by farmers. We know they have concerns about animal health and welfare. We also know they care about the environment and sustainability. But get those same children out onto a farm to experience real farming and their thirst for knowledge is stimulated in a positive, enlightening way. They gain hands-on experience that will stay with them as they continue to grow.

Our research has highlighted that children trust farmers to give them the truest picture of farming, more than any other source. Similarly, teachers are stretched and do not have the time to fully research the area of food production, therefore lacking the confidence to provide pupils with information. Teachers are increasingly looking to the true ‘experts’, the farmers, to do this.


What a fantastic opportunity for our industry to engage directly with the consumers of tomorrow by providing them with up to date, factually correct information about British farming. Brilliant! But where to start?

Well, the industry has produced a successful, readymade solution that’s there for farmers and teachers, as well as children, to use and enjoy. In fact, it has been running every year, every summer for the past six years. I’m talking about Open Farm Sunday (OFS), which provides huge support for participating farmers while consumers, young and old, absolutely love it.

This year will see OFS expand as it introduces a series of pilot Open Farm School Days (3-14 June) around the campaign’s main day on 9 June. This is hugely exciting! AHDB’s milk, cereals, beef and lamb and pig divisions (DairyCo, HGCA, EBLEX and BPEX) have come together to give lead partner support to Open Farm Sunday 2013, along with other key industry organisations. Since its launch in 2006, OFS has attracted nearly 1 million visitors on to farms.

By kind invitation of Annabel Shackleton, OFS Events Manager at Linking Environment and Farming (LEAF), I was fortunate to attend the OFS discussion group at the Livestock Show, last year. This gave me the privilege of hearing a group of extremely enthusiastic farmers sharing their first-hand experiences of OFS 2012. It was truly encouraging to witness so much pride from farmers who took part in the event. Activity ranged from that of one farmer (an OFS veteran) receiving in excess of 4,000 visitors to another who was considering whether or not to participate this year and taking copious notes.

It was clear to me that those participating farmers had no doubt as to their responsibility to engage with their own community and the value of doing this. To them, having the opportunity to communicate the facts about food production, to tell their own story and to build relationships was so rewarding and helped to build confidence in their businesses and their future. Hats off to them.

All Schools taking part in OFS have access to AHDB resources and the British Nutrition Foundation (BNF) Food a fact of life (FFL) education website. FFL is funded by AHDB, BNF, Red Tractor, Seafish, The British Poultry Council and The All Saints Education Trust.

Since launching in 2005, FFL has gone from strength to strength receiving in excess of 1.3 million visitors last year; it is now one of the most recognized education resources for schools. The site offers a whole raft of resources from food production and farming through to consumption. So OFS schools get to have lots of activities to choose from, without the farming industry having to invest in additional materials. That’s got to be a tick in anyone’s school book!